Poetry: The Use And Abuse Of Literature For Life

by hilzoy

(Warning: long musing.)

We all have stories that we tell ourselves about our lives and how we are living them. They are crucial to our attempts to make sense of ourselves, but they can also be dangerous if we accept them uncritically, assuming that we know the shape of the story we fit into, and what it requires of us. I remember one night when this came home to me particularly clearly. I was working at the battered women’s shelter, and I had taken a crisis call from a woman with two children at 2am, and I turned her away, even though we had room, because I thought she was crazy. (There were homeless shelters to go to, and I had given her their numbers, but they are not nearly as good, especially for kids.)

Now: to understand how I felt about this, you have to understand two things. First, women who come to a battered women’s shelter generally have no idea at all what it will be like, and they often expect the worst. They are there because they have no other options. And if you admit a woman who is seriously mentally ill, especially in a way that is genuinely frightening, what happens is that all the other women who are there end up leaving. In practice this means: they go back to their abusers. And it’s hard to blame them: they come to shelters for safety, and if one of the women there turns out to be a serious paranoid schizophrenic, you will not be able to give them the assurance that they will not be harmed. So there was no “safe side” for me to be on in this situation: admitting a woman who is seriously mentally ill is a serious mistake, which could, in our shelter, have led to nine or ten women, and their children, returning to their abusers. (And this is leaving aside the fact that most shelters do not have staff who are competent to deal with serious mental illness. Also, for various reasons, depression is an exception to all this, and every shelter I’ve worked at admitted women who were quite depressed.)

Second, battered women in crisis situations often sound crazy even when they are perfectly sane. They are often hysterical. (Wouldn’t you be?) They sometimes sound paranoid. (There are lots of horror stories about battered women going to see therapists and being diagnosed as paranoid on the grounds that they thought their husbands might try to kill them, when in fact that belief was not just reasonable, but true.) When they manage to escape after being beaten within an inch of their lives, and they are standing at a pay phone in their nightgowns hoping their husband won’t show up with a gun, they are not always models of decorum. They can be defensive and angry and belligerent and rude, or they can be so completely undone that their entire selves seem, temporarily, to be out of commission. All of this makes perfect sense to me; under similar circumstances, I have no idea how I’d react, but I’m fairly sure it wouldn’t be pretty. Nonetheless, when I had to decide, in the middle of the night, whether the person on the other end of the line was actually mentally ill, it wasn’t always easy.

So anyways: I had turned this woman, and her children, away, at 2am, in the rain, yet, and I was sitting out on the porch, thinking: whichever way I had decided, there was a story according to which I had decided wrongly. Suppose I had decided to admit her: I could have been just a little too into the idea of myself as a marvel of compassion and empathy, endlessly helpful to those in need, and been led by this to do something that would have been a disaster for the women who were already there. Alternately, I could have decided not to admit her because I was a little too into the opposite picture: the one in which I, clear-eyed person that I am, had seen through the temptations of an easy and shallow compassion, and realized that sometimes you have to make the tough calls if you want to really do right by people. I could see both of these stories so clearly, and I had no idea at all whether the second was true. And I was sitting there, wondering: what on earth have I just done? How did I arrive at the point where it was possible for me to do it? And is that a capacity I want to have? I decided that the answer to the third question was probably ‘yes’, but it was so terrifying, knowing that all I had in the world to base that decision on was my own judgment, which I know already is flawed, and which at that moment I had no confidence in at all.

Of course, there is no substitute available: you always have to use your judgment. But at that moment it seemed to me such a horribly fallible thing to rely on; and I wished that I had some idea which of the possible stories about me was true. But I didn’t: as (I think) Kierkegaard said, “history can be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards” (or, in Hegel’s more poetic version: “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.”) There are always more than enough stories, and there is never any way of telling which one will turn out to describe you and what you do. So the only thing to do is to use your best judgment, and choose as best you can.

But there’s the rub: according to the divergent stories according to which any decision I made was wrong, my judgment was corrupt, and it had been corrupted, in particular, by my having fallen in love with some particular story about who I was and what my situation called for. And how can you get around that possibility? As far as I can tell, you can’t: you can only try as hard as you can to develop good judgment, and not to let yourself be seduced by an image of yourself, before the need for good judgment arises, since by the time you find yourself talking on the phone to a woman who might or might not be crazy, but who is certainly in need, it’s too late to call good judgment into being. You have no choice but to trust your own judgment, but the task of making it trustworthy is one you need to undertake well before that moment arises.

(As I sat on the porch thinking these thoughts, something happened that would be cheating in fiction: someone called me from another shelter to tell me that I should under no circumstances admit this woman, since she was really crazy, and had gotten violent towards the other residents at that other shelter on an earlier occasion. But the point is: nothing guaranteed that I had made the right call, and nothing guaranteed that I would ever know whether I had or not.)

So: as far as I can tell, there are always too many stories that might or might not be yours. Do people laugh at your artwork? They might be the same sorts of philistines who scoffed at the Impressionists, but then again, they might just be some of the less famous, but surely more numerous, people who laugh at artwork because it’s bad enough to be funny. Do people find you prickly and abrasive? They might be hypersensitive souls who can’t stand to hear hard truths, but then again you might just be prickly and abrasive. Are you a general considering a risky maneuver in battle? You might go down in history as the one who had the guts to risk everything on a shrewd maneuver that lesser beings might have flinched from, and in so doing won the war; or you might just be an idiot who squanders the lives of your soldiers on an ill-considered, pointless plan. And in each case, the reason you are wrong might just be bad luck, but it might also be that you have accepted a story about yourself, and failed to notice that however flattering, it is just not true.

But there is (at least) one way to use stories to do even more damage: namely, to adopt a story that allows you to cast real evil as a sort of heroic virtue. Most character traits are needed at some point or other, and with the right story in place, you can convince yourself that you are at one of those points: that something you want to do, and that is badly wrong, is in fact a difficult and even heroic gesture that only a person dedicated to virtue and justice could make. Here you are not just mistaken about the story you inhabit; you are actively falsifying it in order to allow yourself to pretend that you are not evil, but heroic. At this point, one of our most wonderful features — the creative imagination that allows us to construct stories of real beauty and power — is perverted: the more gloriously compelling the lie you tell about yourself, the more useful it is in protecting you from the knowledge of what you are really doing.

This, for instance, is how I understand Othello: he has a story about himself, and in telling it to Desdemona he both discovers his own creative powers and falls in love with the story he has told. The problem is that that story, which is about his military life, does not include either artistic creativity or marriage; so in telling and falling in love with his story he has already departed from it. Worse, Desdemona was the perfect audience for his story, and that he won her with it was its triumph, but in marrying her he allows her view of him to slip beyond his control, so that if he fails to live up to that story, she will know that he has failed. When Othello and Desdemona arrive in Cyprus, he is clearly off balance: he does not know how to respond in this new situation. At this point, Iago suggests that Desdemona has been unfaithful, and provides a fairly flimsy bit of evidence for this claim that does not begin to outweigh its total implausibility. After a fairly perfunctory show of resistance, Othello embraces the idea of her infidelity, and plunges headlong into fantasy.

Here’s something I once wrote about this:

Iago offers Othello an excuse to duck the challenge of his marriage, to believe that the ‘thrice-driven bed of down’ to which he is having such trouble adjusting is, after all, the familiar ‘flinty and steel couch of war’. Where his marriage to Desdemona had demanded that he discover a kind of virtue beyond his simple nobility, the belief that she is unfaithful allows him to slide back into a parody of heroism: to cast his situation in familiar terms, as one in which he must nobly face an external challenge, resign himself to “the plague of great ones” (III iii 273), and refuse to be tempted from what he takes to be his duty by the passions with which he is so clearly uncomfortable.

Othello must know, on some level, that Desdemona is faithful, and that Iago’s accusations are false. Even if one believed, as I do not, that Iago had distorted Othello’s understanding of Desdemona so thoroughly as to make it possible for him genuinely to doubt her fidelity, he could satisfy himself simply by asking when, during their one and one half days in Cyprus, her “stol’n hours of lust” (III iii 338) might possibly have occurred. But Othello cannot allow himself to ask such questions. He must fight against his knowledge of Desdemona, against clarity, for should he realize that she has not been unfaithful he would have to realize how deeply he has wronged her.

From Act III, scene iii until the end of the play, Othello’s language is governed by his overwhelming need to hide from himself what he is doing, to cover “the ugliness of his thought with the beauty of his imagery” . In these scenes Othello describes himself in inhuman terms, as an instrument of justice or as a force of nature “like to the Pontic Sea/ Whose icy current and compulsive course/ Ne’er feels retiring ebb” (III iii 453-5). In so doing he implies that his revenge is inexorable, a natural phenomenon before which he and Desdemona are equally helpless. He thereby places his actions beyond doubt, beyond question, as though their ‘compulsive course’ were outside even his control. By identifying himself with a cold and unforgiving honour and Desdemona with his failure to live by it, Othello also conceals the fact that this failure is his own. He is an ally of the chaste stars, inhuman and invulnerable; she is fickle, contemptible, “hot, hot and moist” (III iv 39); there can be, it seems, no connection between them.

Othello tortures himself with descriptions of Desdemona’s beauty. It is tempting to see these descriptions, as Othello does, as signs of his great love for her, and of his sorrow at its unforeseen demise. Yet these are Othello’s first real descriptions of Desdemona; until he saw her through Iago’s distorting eyes he scarcely seemed to see her at all. Othello sees Desdemona’s beauty only when it is lost to him; when he must create a fiction of love to prove to himself that he doubts her “upon just grounds” (V ii 139) and not by inclination. He claims that his actions break his heart to convince himself that his sorrow is indeed “heavenly”, since it “strikes where it doth love” (V ii 21-22); to disguise the fact that he chose them.

Othello’s insistence on Desdemona’s guilt, his creation of a fictitious time-frame to accomodate her ‘stolen hours of lust’, and his fascination with the details of her infidelity allow him to pore over the guilt and unexpected weakness which he cannot acknowledge as his own, and to punish it in her. Though Othello has obviously not been literally unfaithful to Desdemona, the crimes of which he accuses her are like his own. Othello concealed weakness under a semblance of perfect virtue, yielded to it almost blindly, broke faith with Desdemona, destroyed their marriage, and betrayed her behind her back. He has ‘found toads knotting and gendering where he had garnered up his heart’ (IV ii 57-62): that is, in himself. His abhorrence of the crimes he attributes to Desdemona is the expression of a hatred whose real causes he cannot recognize. In his cry “But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it” (IV i 192-3) Othello is mourning not only Desdemona but his real love, the beauty and nobility of his perfect soul, now lost to him forever.

Othello kills Desdemona to shield himself from her gaze and the knowledge it would force on him. In courting Desdemona, Othello gave her the power to confirm or deny his visage in his mind. With her love and their marriage he won the confirmation he sought, and the curtain should have fallen on his triumph. Instead he faces a life lived out under her eyes, eyes which have slipped beyond his control, looking where they please, seeing what they will, yet always retaining their power to shatter the image of nobility on which his identity depends. He can find safety only when “forth of my heart those charms, thine eyes, are blotted” (V i 35); the clarity with which those eyes now threaten him would be unbearable. In killing Desdemona he may also think to destroy that part of himself which he has seen in her: the bestial, the treacherous, the degraded; that which gave itself to another, and thereby sealed its fate.

Or, in short: he adopts a story according to which she must die, and which allows him to see his murder of her as his duty, and any thought of compassion as weakness. He uses his poetic imagination to make this story far more powerful than it has any right to be. Finally he kills her, and then kills himself before he can recognize the extent of his responsibility, to forestall the moment when he will no longer be able to tell himself that he “loved not wisely but too well”. Because that’s a lie, and the myth of his own nobility is the one whose falsity he cannot bear to recognize.

So what, you might ask, prompted all this? It was finding this poem yesterday:

Invictus

OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

— William Ernest Henley

This is the poem that Timothy McVeigh quoted after his arrest. An unconquerable soul is a good thing. When you have to do something, it’s good to be able to do it with your head unbowed. But these were not the virtues that Timothy McVeigh was particularly in need of, nor are they any substitute for asking yourself: assuming that I can do what I ought to do without flinching, have I correctly determined what it is that I ought to do? When you tell yourself a story according to which doubt is weakness, and compassion is a temptation, you have to ask whether you are doing so only because you are preparing to do something profoundly evil, and because to do it you need to disable any part of yourself that might make you wonder whether you have, in fact, got things badly wrong.

Two of the finest capacities we human beings have are our moral judgment and our capacity for poetry. Timothy McVeigh and Othello managed to corrupt both at once. I don’t think I would be capable of letting my judgment go so badly wrong that I killed someone as a result, but there are all sorts of lesser corruptions that can lead, for instance, to turning away someone in need at two in the morning. The only way I know to avoid them is ‘the empirick method’: forcing yourself, every time, to consider the possibility that you might be wrong, and paying careful attention both to the evidence around you and to what it tells you about the stories you tell yourself.